Catherine Pierre normally speaks to you from this page. But she recently gave birth to a second adorable daughter, so I have shepherded this issue of the magazine into print as interim editor. As an admirer of the late Steve Jobs, I amused myself by thinking of my temporary title as iEditor. A substantial portion […]

The life cycle of a quarterly magazine writer goes something like this: You spend a great amount of time consuming, on a fairly superficial level, as much news and information as possible. Then something, for whatever reason, grabs you by the throat (or the brain, or the heart) and you spend the next month or […]

Here in Baltimore, as I write this editor’s note in mid-May, we’re enjoying a comfortable 68-degree morning. No one is really complaining about the cloudy skies or the 80 percent chance of rain. Soon enough—next week, according to the weather report—temperatures will begin their inevitable climb into the upper 80s, then 90s, then (help us) […]

News out of Africa these days seems at best a mixed bag, at worst horrific. As this issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine was headed to press, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had stepped down and military rulers had instituted martial law; the potential of a new democracy is promising, but stories along the way of protesters […]

Just for fun, I asked Margaret Guroff, A&S ’89 (MA), if she could remake one scene from the movie Star Wars, what would it be? “I guess it’d be the hologram of Princess Leia,” she told me. “Not sure why though.” Me, I’d take any scene with Chewbacca. This wasn’t an entirely random exchange. Meg […]

Working on a special issue that allows you to learn about a single subject—in this case, happiness—in its many forms and functions . . . Asking readers to write in and tell you what makes them happy, hoping to get maybe a handful of letters, and getting so many responses you can’t fit them all […]

When associate editor Dale Keiger set out to write about Rebecca Skloot’s New York Times best seller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, he got a few quizzical looks. After all, the book—which tells the story of Lacks’ treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital and how the so-called HeLa cells taken from her […]

In January, associate editor Dale Keiger was working on our cover story, “The Buck Goes Here” (p. 36), about cost-effective public health interventions that, if funded, could save many, many lives. As he filled me in on his reporting, he and I talked about the fact that there’s actually plenty of cash out there, but […]

I read senior writer Michael Anft’s cover story, “Now What?”, with special interest. I say “read” rather than “edited” because I’ve spent the last three months on maternity leave. My particular interest in Mike’s story—a roundtable discussion among Johns Hopkins scholars contemplating the future—comes from a new mother’s suddenly profound investment in what lies ahead. […]

You may have noticed a slight adjustment on the cover of this issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine. It says “Fall” instead of “September”—the first indication of our change from a five-times-a-year magazine to a quarterly one. As I mentioned in my June editor’s note, that reduction is the result of our challenging economic times; it’s […]